1981 did not feel like the aftermath, but it did not feel like a new beginning either. The Americans were gone, but they were still fighting the Chinese because of Cambodia. General Giap had resigned as minister of defense. The Central Highlands experienced an abnormal amount of precipitation in January. On the second day of the Lunar New Year, Old Ma’s daughter, at nine and a half years old, had her first period and hid it from her family. Old Ma himself was still known just as “Ma,” but there was early iron woven into his hair. While the subsidy years would not be his most prosperous era, he would still emerge from them having amassed a small fortune due to strategic political friendships and a thriving side career in the black market. Rural Ia Kare, whose inhabitants were desperate enough to murder each other over ration stamps for condensed milk, provided no opportunity for him to spend the money he was clandestinely accumulating. Therefore, every few months, Old Ma would descend from his perch in the hill country to play poker down in Nha Trang, at an illegal makeshift casino set up inside one of the hangars of an abandoned air base outside the city.
It was the local haunt of cadres in the know and the Russians they did business with. Old Ma was acquainted with most of the men who gathered there, and so he was instantly suspicious of the Fortune Teller, having never seen him before, when the man turned up with his briefcase one cerulean coastal evening, clothes rumpled and shoulder-length hair disheveled as if he had blown into the casino on a gust of anchovy-scented ocean wind.
Old Ma was very pleased, however, by the fact that he was able to immediately discern that their new guest was mixed race. It made him feel like he was a secret agent, a career he had always fantasized about. “French daddy in the army?” he said, a little too loudly, as he dropped into the seat across from him. “No need to ask what your mother did for a living, then, eh?” He lifted an eyebrow and made a crude hand gesture. “But you’re a little dark for a halfie, aren’t you?”
At this, the three other men at their table—a young and virulently mustachioed Vietnamese officer and two older Russian arms dealers, one wearing a suit the color of dishwater, the other one dressed for a spaghetti western, eyes obscured by the brim of a creamy white Stetson and toes stuffed into pointy boots of pimpled ostrich skin—started to snigger. The Fortune Teller chuckled gamely along with them through gritted teeth. “Yes, yes, you got me, you sniffed out the baguette crumbs in my veins, well done,” he said, with convincing amiability, and then glanced down at the skin of his deeply tanned forearms. “Am I really that dark?” he muttered to himself. “Perhaps I should get a sun hat.”
But Old Ma wasn’t finished having his fun yet. “So, did Daddy die, or did he just leave you behind when he fucked off back to Paris?” he asked. “And if you’re French, why haven’t they picked you up and put you in a work camp somewhere?”
The Fortune Teller gave him a taut smile. “I never knew my father. And I have a certain ability that was useful enough to keep me out of trouble during the last few decades. I usually manage to end up where I need to be.”
“Ability?”
“I’m a fortune teller.”
But Old Ma’s face was impassive. “What, so, you read palms?” he asked.
“Palms. Birth charts. Faces,” said the Fortune Teller.
“Go ahead, then,” said Old Ma, jutting his chin out so that the lightbulb dangling above their table could illuminate his face. His skin had the pallor and moist, flabby quality of a freshly steamed bánh cuốn. “Read mine.”
“You have a wealthy nose,” the Fortune Teller replied. It was excessively narrow, with cruel little nostrils that were positioned too high up and made every facial expression a sneer. “You have the chin of a gambler—I know, I know, not a particularly insightful thing to say to someone in a casino—but the curve is auspicious. You usually do quite well for yourself when you’re here, don’t you?” Old Ma acknowledged this with a little half nod and a pleased smile, which quickly faded when the Fortune Teller continued: “One of the nephews who works for you is skimming money. He’s been doing it for years. You have a daughter. Your family name will end with her. She is more willful than you think, more reckless than you like to imagine, and one day you will lose her. You will outlive your younger brother, but your death will be far more gruesome, and it is going to be unexpected.”
When Old Ma was furious, he turned even whiter and his nostrils contracted with rage instead of flaring. “And where exactly on my face do you think you read all that?” he hissed.
“In your ears,” smiled the Fortune Teller.
“I can’t stand men who think they’re funny. I’m going to have you thrown into a ditch after I win all of your money,” said Old Ma, snatching up the cards on the table in front of him.
The Fortune Teller proceeded to win every single hand that was dealt. He didn’t have particularly good cards or seem to fully grasp the way the game worked or even appear pleased at the chips accumulating in front of him; the others all just kept receiving combinations that were so bad that they seemed to defy the laws of probability. The Russians were growing vocal in their displeasure, and their dealer even swapped their deck of cards with another table’s to try and prove that it wasn’t rigged.
“Enough,” Old Ma finally said, tossing his truly useless three of hearts and six of diamonds to the side. “We don’t know how you’re cheating, but we’re tired of it.”
The Fortune Teller pushed his mound of chips back to the center of the table. “I don’t need these,” he said. “But it doesn’t seem fair to win all those hands and then walk away with nothing.” He reached across the table and lifted the hat from the Russian cowboy’s head. “This, however, will do nicely. Oh yes. A perfect sun hat.” The Russian was so stunned he did not even protest.
The Fortune Teller was now rummaging in his briefcase for something. “Here,” he said to Old Ma, handing him a small card. “For when you lose her. I can help you find her again.”
Old Ma tore it in half and threw it on the floor without looking at it. The Fortune Teller only smiled and doffed his new hat before ambling out the door. Later that night, when Old Ma reached into his jacket looking for his hotel key, he found another card, identical to the one he had ripped up, perfectly intact and tucked deep into an inner pocket. JFA Fortune Telling, it read in curly letters above a phone number and a Saigon address. Old Ma was too superstitious to throw this one away too.
He stuck it in a cabinet when he got back home, and then did not think of it again until one morning five years later, when his maid went to wake his fifteen-year-old daughter for school and discovered that she was gone.
The Mas were not originally from Ia Kare. In 1955, the main branch of the family had left Nghe An—the province forming the lower jaw of the North, forever on the verge of taking a bite out of Laos—to resettle in Dak Lak. They had built their house on top of the bones of the villa that had once belonged to the Frenchman Louis “l’Anguille” Lejeune, razing it and erecting a compound of gray cement with an appropriately Soviet preponderance of severe angles. In a few years, after the land reforms had had more time to kick in, the house would begin to sprout more stories and architectural ornamentation. But in 1986 the building was still relatively modest, and it took only a very brief search for the Mas to determine that the girl was not in the house.
The police combed through every pepper and coffee field, calling her name. They knocked on each door in the district and stopped all the buses at the Gia Lai border to see if she was being smuggled in one of their cargo holds. Posters of the girl were put up in Buon Ma Thuot. But after three days, when no ransom note had been sent, the detectives ruled out kidnapping. The only place they had not searched extensively was the old rubber plantation. This was because, in addition to being overrun by snakes, it was allegedly haunted by the ghosts of the two Frenchmen who had originally planted the trees, and the spirits of the half dozen bite victims from over the years—people unfamiliar with the area who had made the mistake of wandering in and stepping on something that was not a root. A few brave volunteers had ventured in at the edges, but they refused to go past the third row of trees.
Finally, the police chief told Old Ma that either the girl had gone into the plantation and was dead by now, or she had run away with a boyfriend and there wasn’t anything they could do but wait for her to decide to come back.
Old Ma did not accept this. Of course his daughter didn’t have a boyfriend, he snorted. She was his girl, and she was obedient. If she was in the plantation, he would hire someone to get her out. All of his hair had turned white over the last seventy-two hours; he would not concede defeat to the trees now. Of course, he had no intention of going in to get her himself. Old Ma dug out the card for JFA Fortune Telling, too desperate to let his pride stop him.
The next afternoon, the Fortune Teller arrived in Ia Kare. He was wearing the cowboy hat he had won off the Russian, along with a too-tight denim jacket, too-baggy jeans, and rubber sandals. Unless his briefcase contained a pair of fang-proof boots, Old Ma did not think his outfit seemed like a wise choice in which to attempt to navigate twenty hectares of wild underbrush thick with concealed snakes.
The two men squinted at each other in the strong afternoon sunlight, with clear expressions of mutual dislike.
“Well?” Old Ma said, to break the uncomfortable silence. “Is there something else that you need? Equipment? Weapons?”
“What? Oh no,” said the Fortune Teller, with mild bafflement. “I have everything in here.” He patted the briefcase.
“Good.” Another long and awkward pause ensued. Finally, Old Ma scowled. “Aren’t you going to go find her, then?”
The Fortune Teller pointed to the sky. “I can’t do anything until the sun sets,” he said apologetically. But when he saw Old Ma’s face begin to turn purple with anger, he quickly added: “But I’ll go over to the cemetery to start setting up. If your daughter is in there, I will have her back at dawn.” He loped away down the road, leaving Old Ma to roil in his own despair and ire and impatience.
At the cemetery he made himself comfortable on the ground in the shadow of Su-Su the elephant’s tombstone, forty yards from the unruly edge of the rubber trees. No one else was around. There was enough time for a quick nap if he wanted. The Fortune Teller put his briefcase under his head as a pillow and tipped his hat forward to cover his face. He shifted a little in the grass and removed a pebble that was digging into his lower back. Then he abruptly sat up again and looked at his immediate surroundings cautiously.
“I know you’re there,” he said under his breath. “Yes, you. I can see you. You’re watching me from that big gray stone.” Now the Fortune Teller laughed. “No, don’t go—come out here and meet me. I’d like to talk to you. I’ll be right here; I’m not going anywhere until sunset. Please come.” He leaned back against the elephant’s grave, took out his lighter and three loose cigarettes from his jacket pocket, and waited.
Two hours passed. The sun began its descent and turned hazy at its edges. At last, the woman who had once been known as Odile came into view, walking slowly across the cemetery toward him.
The Fortune Teller stood up to greet her when he heard her footsteps on the grass. When he saw that she was leaning heavily on a cane, he hurried toward her so she would not have to keep walking.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t realize that your body was unwell. I wouldn’t have asked you to come if I had known it was so difficult.”
The woman just glared at him with her magnificent tawny eyes. She leaned against a large gravestone to catch her breath.
“How long have you had the sight?” asked the Fortune Teller.
“I saw for the first time when I was twelve,” she replied, still wheezing. “So, nearly forty years.”
The Fortune Teller smiled at her. “We must be about the same age, then.”
“Oh, don’t start flirting. Cool that French blood of yours down.”
The Fortune Teller’s expression turned serious. “It’s using you up too quickly,” he said, with a nod that at once indicated the woman’s cane, the trembling trunks of her legs, her straining lungs. “You shouldn’t do it so often.”
The woman met his gaze calmly. “Do you have the sight too?”
“No, what I have is, hmm…a slightly different condition,” he said, pausing before the words, as if he was picking them out of his teeth with a bamboo splinter. “But I’ve met others with yours before. Not common though.”
“How soon will it kill me if I don’t listen to you and keep on doing it?”
“Oh, not for years and years. It will be slow, but it will be miserable.”
She shrugged. “I am no stranger to slow misery. Now, what did you call me here for?”
The Fortune Teller looked at her sadly before turning away to face the rubber trees. “Have you been able to see the girl? Do you know where she is in there?”
“I turned the eyes on her this afternoon, before I saw you. She’s in the old smokehouse. It’s toward the center, in the gap between the north and west quadrants of the plantation. She can’t move because she wrecked her ankle tripping in the dark. She’s been kept safe, but she’s weakening.”
The Fortune Teller turned back to face her. “And why didn’t you tell anyone else where she was?” he asked softly.
The sun was now balanced on the edge of the horizon. The woman gave the Fortune Teller a sharp look. “I’ll give you three answers,” she said. “And you can pick which one you like. Either I was too afraid of letting the others know what I was, or I didn’t care enough about the life of that girl to bother, or I pitied her, because I saw the reason why she went into the trees that night and thought she was better off dead than in that house with that man. Choose the one that will make you hate me less.”
“I don’t hate you,” said the Fortune Teller.
“Aren’t you going to ask me why she ran away?”
The Fortune Teller couldn’t meet her cold, gold gaze. “No,” he finally said. “Because whatever it is, I can’t leave her in there. I have to bring her back. You see? I can’t risk wanting to change my mind. Does that make you hate me?”
The woman gave an ambiguous upward twist of her wrists. “I can’t hate anymore. I can’t really care very much at all.” She took her cane in her hand and prepared to limp homeward.
“Wait,” said the Fortune Teller, “Before you go, I want you to promise me something. Will you promise me something?”
“That depends what it is.”
“Don’t watch me tonight when I go in.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m vain,” said the Fortune Teller. “I don’t want you to see the creature that my affliction turns me into.”
The woman turned away from him. “How is that fair,” she said, half to herself, “when you’ve already seen what I’ve been turned into by my own?” She began walking away slowly through the graves.
The Fortune Teller now stood alone in the freshly fallen twilight by the edge of the trees. He knelt and removed his hat. Then he unclasped his briefcase, removed a small piece of folded paper from an inner compartment, and then locked it again. Fingers trembling slightly, he held up his lighter. A thin orange smear of flame caught the corner of the paper alight, and a furl of red-tinged smoke soon followed. The Fortune Teller closed his eyes, leaned over it, and inhaled.
It began the way it always did. The Fortune Teller opened his mouth and began to stretch. The bottom of his jaw dropped down, down, down, past his shoulders, down almost to his navel. And on cue, the smoke began leaching out of the orifice in red tendrils. But here the Fortune Teller reached down and hooked the fingers of his left hand securely over the set of teeth on his bottom jaw, where it was dangling by his stomach. Then, with his right hand, he reached up around his head from behind, brought it down over his face from above, and took hold of the teeth of his upper jaw. Gripping tightly, eyes still shut, the Fortune Teller now began yanking on his mouth in opposite directions, peeling the top half of his face backward, up and over his own head like a sweater, while simultaneously tugging the bottom mandible even lower, over his knees and his feet. He flipped the skin sack of his body completely inside out, swallowing himself in reverse. His interior lining had now become exterior. However, it was not composed of organ meat and pink wetness and capillary webbing but smoke. When it was over, the thing at the edge of the woods was still shaped like a man, but its flesh was made of dense, coppery cloud.
The red smoke drifted upward until it was hovering about two meters off the ground. Then it entered the forest and began moving through the trees. It changed its shape whenever it felt like it, adding more limbs to its humanoid form until it resembled an octopus more than a man, then re-absorbing its tentacles and becoming something amoeba-like instead. It noticed that it was being watched—on the forest floor, dozens of scaly heads looked up in fear as it passed, rearing back with flared hoods and hissing at the apparition. The smoke was amused by them. It adopted their shape out of curiosity, elongating itself into a snake the size of a giant anaconda and slithering on through the air. The moon was out now, bright on its opaque red smoke-flesh. It had been ages since it had been set loose. It felt like singing but it had no mouth of its own.
It had reached the center of the trees. The house was there, built of old, blackened brick, its roof partially caved in. The smoke coiled itself back into a more condensed shape as it entered—blobby and vaguely civet-like, but without a tail. It couldn’t settle on how many feet it should have, so it alternated between four and six little smoke paws.
As it entered the house, the smoke thought it felt something like an old memory of dread flutter inside itself, even though this was impossible. The smoke could not have its own memories, because it was already a memory of a sort. It suspected that if it had come from anywhere, it had been a place much like this one.
Everywhere it looked, thin pelts of rubber in various stages of processing were draped over bamboo racks, ranging from the creamy white of the untreated sheets to a deep orange brown. Where was the girl? The smoke crawled over the edge of a tiled basin and peered inside. It still contained the forgotten curdy residue of coagulated latex from 1954. The building was frozen in time; everything was in the same place it had been left thirty years ago, when the workers had abandoned their posts.
Something rustled behind a door at the far end of the building. The smoke padded silently across the air toward the sound. Snake or girl? it asked itself. It grew an arm with a pincer-like attachment so that it would be able to pull open the door by its handle.
Both. Inside, curled up on top of a pile of the three-decade-old ashes in the latex-smoking chamber, was the missing girl, encircled by a two-headed cobra. The smoke jellyfished itself backward in surprise upon seeing the snake. But the snake seemed to have been expecting the smoke. It slithered tenderly over the body of the girl and then out the door.
The girl was unconscious. The smoke flattened itself into a thin, flat manta ray, intending to use itself as a trowel to scoop up her body. It managed to slip one of its wings beneath her but then only succeeded in shifting her forward a few inches before she flopped off again—she was heavier than anticipated. Frustrated, the smoke stretched itself snake-shaped again. It coiled one end of itself around the girl’s ankles, ignoring the fact that one of them was swollen and discolored, and then heaved her ungracefully out of the chamber. The soft skin of her fragile human body squeaked as it was dragged over the dirty floor tiles, and the smoke felt sorry for her. It unwrapped itself from her legs. There was one option left.
The smoke drew itself out longer and skinnier, from the width of a snake to the width of an eel to the width of a rat tail to the width of a tapeworm—a shimmering red thread, thin enough that the girl wouldn’t feel it. Then it floated over to the corner of her mouth, parted her lips, and began to slowly feed itself into her, inch by inch by inch. When all of the smoke was ingested, the girl’s legs twitched. Her eyes remained closed, but her lifeless arms and legs were drawn upward until they were perpendicular to the ground. Then the rest of her body followed, and she slowly began to rise, her back leaving the floor tiles last. She hung in the air like a sloth dangling from an invisible branch.
Once all of her was aloft, the smoke realized from inside that the girl was facing the wrong way and recalibrated, aerially somersaulting her into an upright position. And then, with the jerky, boneless movements of a tangled marionette, she began to walk.
The smoke was clumsy at first. It was not used to the contours of this body, and it kept accidentally steering her into branches and tree trunks. It could feel the lacerations forming on her skin where thorns caught her; and though it did not understand pain, being unable to experience it, the smoke regretted causing it for the girl, even if she was unconscious. It wished that the girl could see herself walking through the forest in midair—as awkward as the movements were, she was a marvelous sight. Beneath the floating girl, down on the ground, the snakes raised their limbless bodies up as far as they could when she passed over, waving gently at her like the stalks of a strange plant.
Dismounting was even less graceful. When the girl’s body passed through the final row of rubber trees and into the cemetery, the smoke dropped her to the ground with a careless thud and heard something in her delicate human connective tissue make a tiny popping sound. Ashamed, it began to rapidly wind itself out of her. Dawn was already approaching, and the smoke was in a hurry now. It patched itself back into a lumpy approximation of a man. It would do. Then, in a reversal of the self-swallowing at the start of the night, the smoke reached an arm into the place where a throat should be, latched on to something at the inner base of itself, and pulled the skin of the Fortune Teller out by his tongue, flipping him right way round again.
The suit of his body did not lie correctly on his flesh yet—he was still too loose for it, his mouth hanging open far too wide. But by the time the sun rose, it had tightened to fit him once more. The Fortune Teller donned his hat. Then he hoisted the girl in his arms and carried her across the cemetery and back to her home.
There was something still nagging at the Fortune Teller, many months later, long after he had returned to Saigon. Something was amiss inside him. No, something was not amiss, something was missing. At night he prodded his stomach absently, trying to think of a way in which he could calculate how much smoke was in there. He had never considered before that the thing obeyed any laws of physics, or that it existed in a fixed amount. That there were liters of it, or cubic meters. He had assumed that it was regenerative, and therefore immeasurable. But for some reason, he could not get it out of his head that he had inadvertently left some of his smoke behind in the Highlands. And he was not eager to go back and look for it. The Fortune Teller could admit that he was not a very good fortune teller most of the time. But he had seen himself carrying the girl across the cemetery many years before he even learned of Old Ma’s existence. This was why he had known that he must do it. He had already seen the day, far in the future, that Old Ma would be accidentally crushed when a chunk of the overelaborate second-floor balcony he would insist upon commissioning—ignoring the advice of his contractors—detached and landed on his head. He had seen that this would not be his last time in the Highlands, and he had seen that the forest was not finished with him yet.
But he had not seen the child. At that very moment, in the hospital in Ea Sup, Old Ma’s daughter was in labor. Old Ma was not there. He would never acknowledge the birth. He would not learn the gender, and he would not ask to know the name of the childless couple who had agreed to adopt it.
He was at home, instead, imagining the construction of a palatial new wing. He paused in front of a mirror in the hallway and studied his face, remembering what the Fortune Teller had claimed to have read in it. Then he smiled and continued walking, certain that the man had been wrong, and that he was the sole author of whatever future was written there.